Speech pathologists begin life as regular humans. Or at least, I think so. Those of us who choose this profession have many reasons for doing so, I’m sure. But one of them has to be the love of words.

They begin with breath and float across the open divide. You hear them because they translate into a pattern of vibration which travels to your cortex and lands there with a thump, picked up and transformed into combinations of sound that make meaning. And there, finally, communication: the means by which human beings affirm each other.